Tuesday, March 3, 2015

President Nucky O

Fans of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire may recall how the
series opened with protagonist Nucky Thompson fervently denouncing demon
alcohol before the Ladies Temperance League.
In the very next scene the same Nucky Thompson schemes with his cronies to
make millions by subverting the new Prohibition laws and keeping AC awash in
hooch.

If he did not get it, surely some of his Tinseltown
toadies must have caught the joke. Only days before, this same president did an
end run around Congress to impose Net Neutrality by dubious administrative
fiat.

The Prez berated Beijing for forcing “all foreign
companies, including U.S. companies, to turn over to the Chinese government
mechanisms where they can snoop and keep track of all the users of those
services,"

Like Nucky before the temperance league, Obama was
playing for Silicon Valley. Like all
statists he sells the illusion of protection while stabbing constituents in the back.

Like the U.S., the Chinese government justifies its
excesses by blaming terrorists and the need to protect “state secrets”.

The very fact that People’s Republic or the USA has “state secrets” flat out
contradicts the claim that either is a “government of the people, for the
people and by the people”.

Can state secrets by justified by the same logic as
the national debt? Apologists for
government debt tells us not to worry, we owe the money to ourselves. Does that mean that we keep secrets from
ourselves too?

No one keeps secrets from themselves unless they in
pathological denial. This means that the
keepers of state secrets are either hiding bad things from us or they are
deranged. I vote for a combination of
the two.

A couple of weeks ago, both guests on the OnFire Radio Show, referred
to the high level government officials as psychopaths. They may be on to something. Perhaps like Norman Bates, the men at the helm
of states lose touch with who and what they are. The lose sight of right and wrong as we most
people understand it by kindergarten.